Kia Stewart, 27, prepares to get a hug from his youngest brother Travis Stewart as Kia walks out of the Orleans Parish Criminal Courthouse a free man after he spent nearly 10 years of a life sentence behind bars on April 13, 2015. Stewart was convicted of murder by a jury that split 10-2. Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Darryl Derbigny threw out the conviction following requests from Stewart's attorneys and Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office, who together investigated the conviction as part of a newly formed, collaborative effort coined the Joint Conviction Integrity and Accuracy Project.
(Photo by Kathleen Flynn, NOLA.com l The Times-Picayune)

Telly Hankton, who was called the most dangerous man in New Orleans, and Corey Miller, the rapper better known as C-Murder, were both sent away for life on 10-2 votes.

It's possible that if Louisiana required unanimity, jurors in the above cases would have kept deliberating until they all agreed on guilt. But in 48 of 50 states, a non-unanimous verdict means prosecutors didn't prove their cases beyond a reasonable doubt.

Why does Louisiana allow the accused to be convicted of felonies - even to be convicted of murder -- without all the members of a jury agreeing on their guilt? In "Jim Crow's Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana," Thomas Aiello says the law allowing such verdicts was crafted during the Jim Crow era. Passed in 1880, that law made it easier to feed emancipated black people into Louisiana's new privatized convict-leasing system.

Aiello is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University in Georgia. He says that although civil rights activists successfully fought for the removal of other noxious laws created immediately after Reconstruction, non-unanimous verdicts were mostly ignored because "they were localized to one southern state, and their assaults on minorities and the poor were more indirect than laws that specifically barred black customers from lunch counters. They were assumed to be simply another anomaly in the state with so many countless anomalies."

"Jim Crow's Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana."Louisiana is one of the two states that allows people to be convicted of felonies by non-unanimous 12-member juries. Thomas Aiello, a native of Monroe and an associate professor of history and African America studies at Valdosta State University in Georgia, says that the law is a holdover from Louisiana's Jim Crow era. The law made it easier to feed emancipated black people into Louisiana's new privatized convict leasing system. Though the civil rights movement led to the removal of many laws created during the period immediately following Reconstruction, this law never got the same attention. Aiello's book, published by Louisiana State University Press, is called "Jim Crow's Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana."

In the 21st century Louisiana defendants still complain that Louisiana law makes it too easy for the state to convict them. In 2014, the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of Ortiz J. Jackson, who didn't think it was right that he'd been sent to prison for life by a group of jurors that disagreed on his guilt. The Supreme Court declined to hear Jackson's case.

In its brief, the Innocence Project New Orleans says "of the forty prosecutions and convictions that resulted in exoneration, twenty were tried in a manner that allowed conviction by a non-unanimous verdict....In at least nine of these twenty cases, the guilty verdict was returned by a non-unanimous jury." Richard Davis, a staff attorney for the organization, said Tuesday that two more split-jury exonerations have arisen since then. So that's 22 exonerated people who could have been convicted by a non-unanimous jury and 11 who actually were.

Oregon is the only other state that allows non-unanimous criminal jury verdicts. That state's law was passed in 1934, Aiello writes, after a state simmering with anti-Semitism became outraged that a Jewish man accused of killing two Protestants was spared a murder conviction and death because a single juror held out for manslaughter.

The convictions of the two men charged in Marguerite Washington's death brought some small measure of comfort to the student's mother. When I asked Margaret Washington after the trial if it bothered her that the jury didn't unanimously find either defendant guilty, she shrugged and said not everybody's got good sense.

That's true, but prosecutors everywhere else still manage to clear the unanimity threshold to win murder convictions. It should be tough to imprison a person, especially to imprison a person for life.

When Louisiana's original non-unanimous jury law was proposed in 1880, Aiello writes, some lawmakers spoke vehemently against it but eventually accepted it as the Louisiana way.

The law is no less problematic today and no less firmly in place.

"Jim Crow's Last Stand" is published by Louisiana State University Press.